Gig review: All Time Low, Edinburgh

WITH a gig at Wembley arena back in the spring and a show near the top of the bill at the Reading and Leeds festivals this weekend, this set in the relatively small environs of the Corn Exchange during the Edinburgh Festival almost felt like a warm-up club show by All Time Low’s standards.

All Time Low. Picture: Contributed

All Time Low

Edinburgh Corn Exchange

Star rating: ***

With a decade-long career behind them, the punk-pop group from Baltimore in the United States are old hands at this game, but in 2015 they’ve crossed over in substantial fashion with April’s Future Hearts album.

A big commercial success and number one hit in the UK and number two in the US, the record built in great measure upon the reasonable successes they had had before. There was outright adulation going on here, and judging by the ages of most of their fans, the group seem to have hit upon the mother lode – how to not just be a success with armies of teens, but how to keep that going as your fans grow older and a new wave emerges.

Appearing tanned and in sleeveless shirts on a hot Edinburgh night, it’s easy to see why their female fans approve of such pin-up fodder. Yet the music was fast and spirited, and while it’s easy to adopt a seen-it-all-before attitude with the heavily-recycled format of punk-pop from across the Atlantic, the quartet certainly put on a show, with singer Alex Gaskarth inviting fans up on stage during Time-Bomb and regaling us with cover version bursts of the Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) and blink-182’s All the Small Things amongst their own big crowd-pleasers like Something’s Gotta Give, Kids in the Dark and Dear Maria, Count Me In.